ROME (ITALY)
Crux
April 9, 2019
By Elise Harris
On Monday night Peruvian journalist Pedro Salinas, who had been accused by an archbishop with the crime of aggravated defamation related to an ongoing abuse scandal, was found guilty and slapped with a hefty fee and one-year suspended prison sentence.
Judge Judith Cueva Calle of the First Unipersonal Criminal Court in Piura, Peru, ruled April 8 that Salinas was guilty of aggravated defamation of Archbishop Jose Antonio Eguren Anselmi, who runs the Piura archdiocese, and ordered him to pay roughly $24,000 in addition to his suspended jail sentence.
Carlos Rivera Paz, Salinas’ lawyer, said they’re planning to appeal the decision during an April 22 hearing when the full sentence is read.
“We are going to reject the arguments, and we hope that the appeals court has a little more sense and makes a better evaluation of the evidence,” he said.
Salinas and fellow journalist Paola Ugaz, also being sued by Eguren Anselmi, co-authored the 2015 bombshell book Half Monks, Half Soldiers, detailing years of sexual, psychological and physical abuse inside the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), a controversial Catholic organization that originated in Peru and whose founder, layman Luis Fernando Figari, has been accused of physical, psychological and sexual abuses and was prohibited by the Vatican in 2017 of having further contact with members of the group.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.